Product: Web Application Storage

Goals

The goal of this work is to document for the community good practices relating to the use of client-side local
storage by Web Applications.

Success criteria

The TAG comes to consensus on good (and bad) practices relating to the use of local, client-side storage mechanisms by
Web applications.
The analysis should include, but not necessarily be limited to consideration of:

What are the requirements for client-side storage: for example, offline applications, personal data for use by applications, performance.

How well do existing client-side storage facilities (AppCache, Web Storage, Indexed DB) meet these requirements: for example, how seamless can we make the transition between Web connected and offline applications? Which facilities best match which requirements?

Should URIs be used for identifying locally stored data, and what should be the
relationship (if any) to URIs used for the same or similar data
elsewhere? (For example: if a Web-based email reader provides a local
database to support offline operations, is it desirable
for the same URI to be used to identify the email in the local
store as when accessed via HTTP? How does this work if the local store
is modeled as, e.g., relational?)

How does client-side storage relate to a browser's HTTP cache?

Privacy issues: e.g. control of access to information by other Web or non-Web applications. Granularity of access control, etc.

Security: protection of data in the local store. Presumably a
threat analysis and prioritization would be a first step in this work.

Space management policies for client-side storage, including balancing space use across multiple applications.

The TAG publishes either full W3C Recommendation(s) or TAG finding(s) that effectively communicates the issues
and good practices to the Web technical community.
The current thinking is that we will likely first focus on documenting issues, and perhaps later produce additional work on best practices.

Key deliverables with dates:

TAG Note: Issues relating to Local Storage of Data by Web Applications Due date: 1 July 2012

The above will be the initial work in this space...others TBD. For
now, we have some hope of one or more best practices finding(s) by Dec.
2012